New Advances in Formosan Linguistics
Date
2015
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Asia-Pacific Linguistics, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University
Abstract
The present volume is a festschrift in honour of Lillian M. Huang, who, in a very few
years, became a leading figure in Formosan linguistics after she obtained her PhD degree
in 1987. Over the past twenty-eight years, she has been involved in important
groundwork, in both academia and indigenous language policies in Taiwan, as we will
show below (sections 3 and 4). She has been engaged in the development of both through
her pre-eminent role in projects relating to typological studies on Formosan languages in
the early 1990s, and on language teaching materials and proficiency tests since the late
1990s and early 2000s.
Lillian may retire in a few years. Before she does, we thought it would be most
appropriate to honour her by putting together papers by a number of scholars and students
who have benefitted from or have been in contact with her in one way or another (e.g.
through collaborative work, teaching, supervising, advising etc.). The idea of such a
volume was conceived by Elizabeth Zeitoun in the autumn of 2009. Further plans were
initially worked out with Stacy F. Teng, soon joined by Joy J. Wu. The three editors have
been close to Lillian since the early and mid 1990s. Of the three, Zeitoun, who has been
working with her on diverse projects for over twenty years, is her closest collaborator on
the academic level. Both Wu and Teng were Lillian’s MA supervisees. Through her
fieldwork courses, she introduced Wu to Amis and Teng to Puyuma, languages on which
they are still working.
The title of the present volume, New advances in Formosan linguistics, reflects our
pursuit of publishing cutting-edge, provocative, and thoughtful papers that explore new
directions and perspectives on Formosan languages and linguistics. It is worth noticing
that this is the first collected volume on Formosan languages that has not issued from a
workshop or a conference—the papers included in this volume are thus varied in terms of
topic coverage—and the first that specifically deals with (and covers nearly all) the
Formosan languages, a grouping understood in its broader context, that is, including
Yami, a Batanic (Philippine) language spoken on Orchid Island under the political
jurisdiction of Taiwan. (Note: first three paragraphs of foreward).
Description
Keywords
Taiwan languages, Austronesian languages, Taiwan languages--Dialects--Phonology, Taiwan languages--Morphosyntax
Citation
Zeitoun, E., Teng, S.F. & Wu, J.J. (Eds.) (2015). New advances in Formosan Linguistics. Canberra, ACT: Asia-Pacific Linguistics.
Source
Type
Book
Book Title
Entity type
Access Statement
Open Access
License Rights
Released under Creative Commons License (Attribution 4.0 International)